Daring to try my own suggestion…
We didn’t have to wait long for another campus shooting. Early reports indicate one dead and three wounded in a shooting at Northern Arizona University’s Flagstaff campus.
This thread is open to discussion of the event but PLEASE KEEP GUN CONTROL DISCUSSION OUT OF THIS THREAD.
A separate thread has been created for the inevitable discussion of gun control issues.
Stating the obvious… based upon the time of the incident this does not appear to be a gunman in an active shooter situation such as occurred recently in Oregon.
Details are still limited but the suspect is in custody. Sounds like he (assuming a male shooter) is not the deceased.
Good that there is only one victim. I have to wonder what makes this newsworthy. There are single murders every day in the US, does it happening on a campus make it newsworthy? Details are few at the moment, maybe it was a typical random attack or perhaps he meant to kill this one person. BTW- thanks for making two threads at once, one with and one without gun control discussion.
Campus shootings are scary because we send our kids there, and we need to trust they are safe. Yes, the kids eventually move out and the world can be dangerous anywhere, but college is usually the first stage of that transition. We can’t protect our kids, and yet they are still our dependents and generally, still officially living at home.
They just seem particularly vulnerable.
Colleges should be safe places, but of course the reality is they are as dangerous (or not dangerous) as anywhere else. As a parent, that’s hard.
ETA: Shortly before I left for grad school there was a shooting at a Canadian university. The shooter entered a classroom, asked all the men to leave and executed the women. It shook my confidence a lot, just before leaving for school myself. École Polytechnique massacre - Wikipedia
One dead but three wounded, so it becomes a “multiple shooting”, and in that case yes there is a self-reinforcing element about it happening on-campus, greatly because of the mentioned expectation/aspiration of it being a “safe space”. The public and the media are now highly primed to react to “school shooters”.
One hesitates to draw a difference between “a common murder that happened at a campus” and “a School Shooting<TM>” but it’s almost like we’re being forced to create it.
I think there are dozens of sickos out there who decide to do this, because the media gives them their moment of fame. I think there should be some restrictions on the reporting of these horrible events, because it is clear that publicity is what the perps desire.
With multiple woundings it’s more significant in my opinion. So it wasn’t a common murder, just another mindless rampage. Yes, schools are supposed to be safe. I sent two kids through college, and I had enough to worry about without thoughts of gun violence. It isn’t the media’s fault that these get attention, though I suspect with a lower death count it won’t stay in the headlines as long as Oregon.
I’d wait until we get police reports on how things came down, Bob~. I note your conclusion “another mindless rampage, not a common murder” because there were multiple wounded, but with the info we have so far I could not yet really conclude that myself (I’m unfortunately familiar enough with urban crime situations where multiple bystanders go down)
Apparently,the shooting happened in a parking lot at 1:20 am. A group of students got into an argument and one of them pulled out a gun and shot at the others.
This was not one of those incidents where a heavily armed gunman barged into a classroom or other building.
The latest article I’ve read suggests that there was a confrontation between groups, rather than one person going on a premeditated rampage. It feels odd to say that I hope that’s true, because it’s still bad no matter the motivation. I guess it’s a little easier to process people overreacting during a fight than it is someone plotting mass murder.
It’s still early. Maybe it was a fight gone bad, we’ll know more later.
Very tragic. I was a student there in the 60’s. Beautiful area.
At 1:20 AM, there may have been drugs/alcohol involved. Only one gun, not a fair fight.
It troubles me when people believe that problems can be resolved by killing others.
I don’t know if gunman is the right word here. How many times has a shooter been someone other than a student (and I think a couple were teachers)? Gunman seems to imply someone who had no business being on campus.
One report I saw said that the dead man’s fraternity got shot up in a drive-by (with no injuries) back in 2011, which was suspected to relate to drug sales from the fraternity house. No idea whether any of that relates to today’s shooting, of course.
New around these parts, aintcha?
Same day (Friday), there was a campus shooting in Houston, Texas too. Similar to the Flagstaff shooting (but in mid-day), it was apparently a dispute that went out of control, not an “active-shooter” massacre.
Campus Shootings in Texas and Arizona Kill 2 Students and Wound 4, NYT, Oct. 9, 2015.